Marius the Epicurean

Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas by Walter Pater, 467 pages (2 vols)

The great aesthetician Walter Pater's celebrated novel is superficially a fictional biography of a literary Roman aristocrat in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, but primarily it is an exploration of the culture of that era, as well as that of Pater's own Victorian era and indeed all eras.  Marius the Epicurean is therefore about ideas rather than characters, an exposition of the author's aesthetic and cultural theories.  Pater never drops his modern viewpoint, and while it can be jarring at first to hear a second-century philosopher compared to Rousseau's Savoyard Vicar, the reader may gradually come to appreciate the author's awareness of the historical moments of both himself and his characters.